I think we’ve seen the beginning of the end with the Diablo fiasco!
RIP Steve.
So incredibly accurate. The sad truth is, The executives just do not care and i’d wager some individual developers within do not either.
For them its all about $. Its not about product integrity anymore or the integrity of a franchise its all about soulless money. I do not want video games to become an art form if these soulless fools are pushing out content for the sake of money instead of being willing to make a good product. There are plenty of examples of companies who make good products especially in gaming and have made an absolute killing money wise.
I wish they were all like that.
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Using words like “Blizzard”, “Blue”, etc. is against the forum CoC.
EDIT:
Don’t use words like “Blizzard,” “Blue,” or any employee names in a thread topic.
Everyone would like Blizzard to read and acknowledge his or her post, and we understand that. However, these kinds of posts won’t help you achieve your goal. Please make your thread title relevant to the post subject. Threads violating this guideline are subject to removal, along with forum account suspension.
Of course it is because truth is hard to accept. I don’t think they’re that heavy on that policy on WoW forums as long everything is kept civilized. They can bypass that low level policy.
Read Jason Schreier’s Kotaku article on Blizzard from a few days ago, he spoke with Blizz employees anonymously and they all said Diablo Immortal was made almost entirely for the Chinese market and for China, and that they were planning on releasing it over there ONLY for a while before bringing it to NA eventually.
And that a different team other than the main diablo creation team made immortal. The main Diablo franchise team is at work on Diablo 4 since 2016
I was pissed at seeing Immortal at Blizzcon but after reading the article, the picture is much more clearer and I have hope again for Diablo franchise
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I’m not sure that really applies as much to Blizzard overall at least not in the way you are implying it.
Diablo’s never been my cup of tea so I’m not as familiar with the staff on it’s team but, the leads on both Wow and Overwatch are both primarily at Blizzard for their gaming backgrounds.
Overwatch’s Game Director Jeff Kaplan was a Creative Writing Graduate who was a major Everquest player who Blizzard hired.
Wow’s lead Ion Hazzikostas was a lawyer who was a major WOW player in Elitest Jerks who Blizzard hired.
This isn’t a case of having a bunch of business/marketing guys calling all of the shots and doing a bad job of it.
Blizzard’s development teams have plenty of passion and that’s probably part of the problem.
Passion can be an incredible asset but, it can also be a liability that blinds you.
The development team on both Wow and Overwatch have been ignoring feedback and ramming into problems because they are so sure they are always right.
As for Immortal:
That happened months before Blizzcon. Even Microsoft knew that launching a mobile game to an audience wanting something else was a bad move and they made a joke out of it.
The Blizzcon announcement wasn’t due to being too corporate or too marketing heavy it was just being stupid.
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The biggest issue Blizzard no longer has focus on quality of product, they have since fallen into the trap that is the modern corporate infinite profitability. Basically every quarter you need to make even higher profit than last quarter no matter what it takes.
Many companies are falling into this flawed thinking. I’m not saying they can’t make profit, but they’ve now begun to cut corners to lower costs at the cost of the products they wish us to consume.
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Have you been on WoW forums?
Every day is Sunday these days.
Yeah it’s gotten worst with the new forum, but then again I don’t think many care anymore seeing how the company in a bit of sad state of reputation. I suppose people are concern of their favorite franchise future and they have every right to be.
if i can give likes more than once, i’d give 100 likes on this.
“the rework is a success”
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OW balancing until recently is some of the slowest I’ve seen in a game - but especially a competitive one that hopes to be an esport. They also seem to be really slow on new lore and haven’t added any new events or game modes in a while.
I’m not fully disagreeing with you but do you think the team is super passionate? I like Jeff but I never got the perception that they were super passionate developers. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by other studios though.
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One of the things you occasionally see people related to Blizzard mention is:
Here’s a comic that’s more than six years old about Blizzard’s balance
Some of the slowness and imbalance is probably deliberate because they feel that’s a good strategy.
Some of it is because they don’t see mistakes as mistakes. If you look at Goodman on the Mercy stuff he’s only gone with a we were too slow.
I’m curious if some of it is a mix of them internally playing on a different build with the same people over and over with hero selections that are non-optimal. At the same time they were working with Mercy’s changes they may have had Moira and possible Brig on their internal servers.
With Chu on the lore while his public output isn’t very high he’s regularly got little irrelevant details on twitter that he’d never actually need to have come up with in many cases and he’s gotten into enough disagreements with people over lore that you have meme’s about things being a misconception. If he didn’t care about it he wouldn’t be getting into fights/correcting people.
Some of the issues with the lack of production in certain regards may be due to the international nature of the game which limits the ability for you to wing anything as you need to get things translated and have multiple voice actors say each line. The polish on some of the animation is also both impressive and really time consuming.
That is Doomfists hero select animation which was made over 5 days.
I think the engine may also suffer from issues. They’ve said Retribution took a year to put together. This would significantly slow down lore if they can’t speed things up and aren’t comfortable delivering the lore via comics/news articles. If the story they want to tell is complicated or goes in a direction that may be an acquired taste doing it in comics/news articles could really hit issues with appeal.
Some of the stuff like Hammond were in the works for four years+ because one of the artists really likes the idea of intelligent animals from the moon. Moira’s got lots of Anime references because that’s what the staff are into.
It’s also really unclear from the outside what staff are assigned to do what and how long things are actually taking.
TLDR:
They care about what they are making but, not so much about the people that are actually using what they make.
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I didn’t know they had a reputation for that in balancing. My only exposure to Bliz games is my brother’s playtime in SC and SCII. I didn’t get that impression for that series (probably because you really need decent balance between the 3 races for the game to work at all - and a lot of the best techs stay there). It’s interesting that this is considered a strategy. I think either of other two options are more appealing. I guess OP vs OP is the Paladins approach though I haven’t played it.
That’s a fair point on the lore thing.
I’ll agree everything in the game is polished to a gleam. I always assumed that was a primary executive goal, but I can see how it’s believably just the results of a perfectionist and passionate team. I guess their focus is just so at ends with what I would consider the priorities of an ‘esport game’ that I read into that as disinterest.
Thanks for the thoughtful post. Knowing they have a take turns approach to balancing is very interesting. I’m kinda disappointed though, I was hoping they were just getting their feet wet still and struggling to make people have similar impact. I hope heroes change turns more often moving forwards then.
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This isn’t fair. People are working for below market wages, living in group homes, and working 60 hours a week to make this game what it is.
It’s also pretty easy to see that even Jeff is in love with this game, but he has bosses too.
You can side eye corporate all you want but the developers definitely deserve some respect.
I feel like this resonates with OWL quite a bit